What is your thesis topic?
As a new concept of alloy system, high-entropy alloys (HEAs) abandon the “base-element” idea and adopt a mixture of multiple principal elements in an equimolar or near-equimolar ratio to form multi-component alloys. Mechanical behavior of HEAs is one of the major topics and is yet to be explored. My thesis topic is to provide the fundamental understanding of mechanical, tribological behavior at small scales and local lattice structure of BCC structured TiZrHfNb-HEAs.
How is materials processing involved in your research?
My main research topic is to investigate mechanical behavior at small scales of high-entropy alloys. We used arc-melting and drop-casting to fabricate the alloys. Hot rolling, cold rolling, and heat treatment (including homogenization, annealing, aging, etc.) were performed to control the microstructure of the alloys. Mechanical tests and microstructure characterization were then carried out to build the relation of processing-microstructure-mechanical properties of the alloys. One of my other research projects is to study the energy and keyhole coupled mechanism in laser additive manufacturing (AM) of high-entropy alloys.
Provide an example of where the material/process/properties you are studying might find an application.
One of my projects is to study the tensile creep behavior of Mg-Gd binary alloy. Traditionally, the precipitate-free zone (PFZ) is treated as a blank region with weak strength. However, in this project, we employed hot rolling, solid solution treatment and then artificial aging to introduce a high density of PFZs along grain boundaries. We unexpectedly found that the high density PFZs can relieve local stress concentration and catalyze a homogeneous stress distribution, thus enhance creep resistance